Keith at Spectrum -- 10Jan2009

Wow -- one of the craziest gigs, ever. Started out with a lot of people already there, including lots of kids. I like kids, and am used to dealing with kids, so that was fine with me. There was one little boy, 5 or 6 years old, who was really interested in my stuff, and kept jumping up on the stage to play my guitar (I always hold a chord or two and let kids strum a bit), and running around with his brother and big sister (though they were much more subdued). At first is was kinda cute, and I expected some embarrassed and apologetic mom to appear and gather him up pretty soon, so I was tolerant. But it went on and on, and his mom, finally realizing once or twice, would take him away -- but he'd be back just a few minutes later. Definitely not Parent of the Year.

It became a running joke between me and the audience -- me putting up with the interruptions, and letting him strum the guitar one more time, and trying to keep the songs going while the kid was running around below and behind me, threatening to trip on the wires, and playing with the knobs and switches on the electric guitar which was sitting behind me on a stand (about which, more later). He'd run off and let me do a song while he played in the fountain, then show up again to jump onstage, strum my guitar a few more times, then gone (using my padded guitar case down front as a landing spot), then back during the next song to mess with the electric guitar again. I managed to keep the chords and words together, regardless of what the kid was up to, but it was a challenge.

It really went on a long time, and some of the adults in the audience were starting to wonder if these kids didn't actually have a mom in attendance, but finally, she reappeared and took them all away. I swear she called him "Shaggy", but maybe it was something Persian that sounded like that. He was cute, and not really destructive (he never *actually* tripped on a wire, just came really close, and never *quite* managed to knock the electric guitar off the stand, though that was pretty close too), and he never directly interrupted a song, but, wow, that was tough on the concentration.

Anyway, overall there was probably two or three times more people in attendance than the previous couple of shows -- the much-warmer weather obviously helping. For a while there, every table was full, with some folks sitting on the planter-box benches as well. I've never seen it "sold out" before. There seemed to be waves: families with young kids at first (there for a cheap dinner at the food court itself), then older people and couples (possibly hanging out after a dinner in one of the real restaurants), then finishing out the night with lots of teenagers in roving packs.

Those can be problematical, of course, but I managed to strike a balance of fulfilling the (girls') honest requests, and ignoring the (boys') "funny" ones (they tend to ask for "Puff, the Magic Dragon", etc., thinking that they're being oh-so-clever). But I think the boys started to realize that the old guy wasn't half bad, and stopped trying to start up some fun at my expense. There was a table with three boys at it that weren't part of the big group, and they were genuinely asking for James Taylor songs. And then a Jim Croce song, one of which, by luck, I had just (re)worked up. And I had a sweet little Asian girl nearly swooning over any and all of my Beatles songs. When the pack of 20 or so kids showed up, and the boys started (loudly) dragging chairs over to sit smack-dab in front of me with their "Entertain me, I dare you" attitudes, I thought I was in trouble -- but I managed to turn it around and we all had fun.

Earlier in the week, it occurred to me that, although I can't use my electric guitar when Warren's with me because then the two guitars sound too much alike, I should be able to use it when I'm out solo. So I brought it this time, expecting to have a nice empty plaza to test it out on. But it never did get empty, so I just kept playing the acoustic until the very end, when Geneva and her friends (and Acacia) were there, and I wanted to try it out (and show it off) for at least a song or two.

So I switched over and played my newly-rebuilt ultra-minimalist "Wicked Game", "Come Together", "The Wind Cries Mary", and my now-standard closing song, "Golden Slumbers". They all worked out pretty well, except, oddly enough, "... Mary", which is the most "electric" song of the bunch. I guess, since I'm *not* Hendrix, that it requires a Very Different approach, and doing it on the electric made it Too Close, but, of course, lacking. It needs to sound like a "Hendrix Unplugged" version.

Anyway, there are probably other songs on my list that could be done on the electric, and I think it was successful enough to keep experimenting with it -- especially in outdoor settings. If nothing else, it keeps the challenge (and therefore, interest) level up for me. And it's nice to have *some* kind of variation in The Sound, though the changeover time is prohibitive to do it more than once or twice a night. I guess I'll have to have a little electric "set" in the middle with 4 or 5 songs, then back to the acoustic to finish out.

So -- interesting, crazy, extremely variable, challenging, and very fun, night. I sold one or two CDs, and made $58 in tips -- still not enough to want to hand $50 back to the Spectrum people, but darn good. At one point I looked out and realized that there were several groups of people sitting at the tables, without any food, and with all the people wrapped around the "far side" of the tables so they were all oriented towards *me*. They were listening to me, *on purpose*. I don't often get that impression from more than a few people at once. There's usually one or two people per night that are clearly Listening, and they're what keeps me doing this, but this was 10 or a dozen people, at the same time. Wow.